Kennedy High teacher Aaron Kahlenberg rallies with about 100 parents and students in support of LAUSD teachers at the corner of Topanga and Ventura Blvd in Woodland Hills Friday afternoon. Los Angeles Unified School District Teachers may go out on strike Monday. (Photo by David Crane, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

A typical teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District makes roughly $80,000 a year, but those wages are still below counterparts in major cities in California and other states, according to an analysis of 2017 pay records.

United Teachers Los Angeles is asking for higher pay, among other demands, ahead of a planned strike Monday. The district and the union have struggled to come to an agreement on new contract for the last two years. UTLA’s request for a 6.5 percent raise, effective July 2016, is one of the hangups.

Administrators have offered 6 percent, with the raise divided between the last school year and current one.

Los Angeles Unified is the second largest school district in the country, but new and veteran teachers typically make less compared to its closest peers, according to a review of educators’ salary schedules in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, San Diego and Long Beach.

How LAUSD compares

Chicago Public Schools is the third largest school district in the country, yet it has 300,000 fewer students than LAUSD.

In Chicago, a teacher starts at $52,958 and caps out at $108,242. In Los Angeles, salaries begin at $50,428 and peak at $88,253. A veteran teacher would need a doctorate and decades of experience to qualify for the highest wages.

The median salary for a full-time teacher in LAUSD — the midpoint at which half of all salaries are higher and half are lower — is $80,420, compared to $83,635 in Chicago. Teachers in Long Beach had a median salary of $94,285 that same year.

The medians were calculated from tens of thousands of 2017 pay records publicly released by the districts. Teachers who made less than the minimum salary for their position were excluded in an effort to capture only the wages paid to full-time employees.

For LAUSD, the pay records covered 23,254 teachers. A district spokeswoman provided a similar median salary from LAUSD’s internal statistics.

Full-time teachers in Los Angeles received roughly $24,000 in health and retirement benefits in 2017. Chicago paid about $4,000 more toward benefits that same year.

LAUSD, however, also offers another incentive — lifetime medical, dental and vision benefits for retirees. Two years ago, the unfunded liability for those benefits was calculated at more than $15 billion by a risk-management firm. The district’s proposed contract includes a two-year increase, in retirement age or years of service, to qualify for retiree benefits.

A raise would help

If LAUSD teachers accept the 6 percent raise on the table, the district’s starting salary — and median — would surpass Chicago. Pay for the most experienced teachers, however, would still be roughly $15,000 less.

The proposed increase also would put LAUSD more in line with San Diego and San Francisco’s much smaller school districts. Locally, Long Beach would still offer higher wages for teachers across the board.

In a statement, Jenny Hontz, a spokeswoman for the parent advocacy group Speak Up, urged the state to invest more in public education to bring per-pupil funding more in line with states such as New York. The maximum pay for a teacher is nearly $120,000 in New York City, according to salary schedules from its Department of Education.

“We believed teachers should be paid much higher salaries and should be rewarded for excellent work, not just for staying an additional year,” she stated.

What a state panel recommended

A state-appointed panel recommended UTLA accept the 6 percent increase with no contingencies. A report from the fact finder stated that teachers in the district deserve to be “better ranked in comparison to other jurisdictions,” particularly because of the high cost of living in Los Angeles and the needs of the student population.

Recruiting and retaining teachers through higher salaries and benefits “should be a priority,” wrote David Weinberg, chairman of the panel. However, those raises must be balanced against the district’s poor financial state and the union’s costly request for reduced classroom sizes, he said.

“The district offer of a 6 percent increase is warranted based on the comparative position of the bargaining unit in wages and benefits, the current settlements involving other school districts and internal bargaining units, and the cost-of-living increases that are faced by the unit members in Los Angeles,” Weinberg stated.

In addition to reduced class sizes throughout the district, UTLA has asked administrators to hire more nurses, librarians and counselors at its schools.

As of Friday, LAUSD had offered to spend $130 million in 2019-20 toward the goal.

Part of the disagreement between UTLA and LAUSD’s administrators rests on the district’s reserves. LAUSD has $1.8 billion in the bank, but administrators say deficit spending will eat up most of its savings by 2022. And some of the money is earmarked for the raises.

Superintendent Austin Beutner said accepting UTLA’s $900 million proposal would bankrupt the district.

On Wednesday, the Los Angeles County Superintendent of Schools Debra Duardo announced plans to assign a team of fiscal experts to work with LAUSD to develop a stabilization plan in an effort to prevent deficit spending. The county Office of Education has threatened in the past to take over the district’s financial decisions.

Duardo said LACOE has no position on the ongoing negotiations, but would “study closely any settlement reached to ensure that any financial commitments are combined with appropriate reductions to achieve a balanced budget.”

UTLA has rejected LAUSD’s claims of potential insolvency. Union President Alex Caputo-Pearl said the district has previously projected “fiscal cliffs” that never occurred.

Jason Henry is an investigative reporter with the Southern California News Group. Raised in Ohio, Jason began his career at a suburban daily near Cleveland before moving to California in 2013. He is a self-identified technophile, data nerd and wannabe drone pilot.